BECAUSE A WRITER NEVER TRULY SAYS GOODBYE
by Tribeca
Summary: From a sad Shenny lover to my comrades who feel the same pain as I. To what might have been…to what could still be…to anyone who ever had the dream. Sheldon and Penny…sigh…Sheldon and Penny. *complete*


**A/N: Like many of you, I read the taping report for 6.14 with a heavy heart. (The Cooper/Kripke Inversion-I think it will air in the States at the end of January.) We knew it was a long shot going in, you and I, but we banned together and loved Shenny anyway. I've always done that you know, rooted for the underdog. And maybe that's a common trait amongst us Shennyshippers…we root for the underdog…we **_**are**_** the underdogs…perhaps. And sometimes, every now and then, the underdog wins. **

**I can't be so bold as to say this will be my last Shenny fic, because God, how I love them, how I love to write about them, how I love to discuss them with you all, but for now…for now…oh, for now…I will be taking a (short) break.**

**I would like to say I'll not watch the remainder of season six or any of season seven but I don't know if I have that kind of constitution. Time will tell. **

**Most importantly, I want to thank you all, my sweet and funny and sincere readers, for the PMs and reviews and the commiserating and the shoulders to cry on over this…this most perfect and beautiful couple. What could have been, what should have been, what might have been, **_**if only**_**.**

**~o0o~**

**I'll keep my fingers crossed and I'll hold my breath and count to three and make a wish. And we'll see what happens next…**

"… _**just to clarify, when you get to three, do we stand up or do we pee?" Sheldon Cooper, Extraordinaire**_

**~o0o~**

**Here's to kicking the door down and taking names…to the dreamers and the schemers who lay open their souls for the world to see. This one's for you. **

BECAUSE A WRITER NEVER TRULY SAYS GOODBYE

The writer (let's call her Tribeca, shall we?) perched her recall uncomfortably on the blue-green sofa that rested in her mind's eye. Her gaze darted around the all too familiar fictional room and her brain sped faster than she wanted. Memories flooded her heart…memories of Soft Kitty and a drug addled state of mind…memories of Penny Blossoms and acting lessons and time spent preparing for a dreaded court appearance…memories of adhesive ducks and a breast innocently mistaken for an arm…memories of spaghetti and cut up hotdogs, of a brilliant boy searching the room for the perfect spot to claim as his own, of conversations about friends with benefits and old married couples and panty piñatas…memories that were fading but stubbornly refused to take their leave.

Tribeca knew that if she dared to depart this apartment of her mind and move into the hallway and then cross the hall and enter into the boy's apartment, her heart would be saturated with even more memories. Memories of that first meeting when this boy with the beautiful mind couldn't take his eyes off of the green-eyed blonde girl nor could the streetwise Nebraskan take hers off of him, memories of spot stealing and food touching and Halo explosions. The memory of the time he was so betrayed by his friends that he curled into a fetal position and cried and she was the only one to offer him comfort, she'd attempted to touch him but had pulled away for fear of causing him greater distress than he was already experiencing.

This writer, this Tribeca, was befuddled as to why this fictional couple had forever tugged at her usually stoic heart. She flashed to an even more recent memory of the final spark of hope that was now fading. The memory of the time the girl had pinned the boy to the floor and in her momentary loss of control she'd kissed him. The physicist's eyes had gone wide and he'd thought for a mere nanosecond of losing control with the waitress and returning the kiss but his all too sharp mind nudged him past the moment, reminded him of the others in the room, and he'd yelled for her to stop. And she finally did stop after giggling and turning what had been a tiny moment of truth into a silly moment of playfulness and no one, except for maybe the two of them, was none the wiser.

There were memories of gifts given and gifts received and a hug that was forever seared into the soul of every individual that witnessed it. It was a hug for the ages. But alas, that was gone, a thing of the past, a tease, a heartbeat away from being what it should have been, snatched away like every other hope for these two.

And so Tribeca stayed put in the fictional apartment conjured by her writer's mind, not wanting to sort though the ache that crossing the hall would bring. She glanced towards the kitchen and dared herself to let the best memory of all spill into her soul…the memory of the boy asking the girl out on a date.

Tribeca shook her head at this one. She wondered how different things would be now if only the girl had not foolishly assumed that the boy was joking, only asking her out of some sense of jealously over his almost girlfriend dating the owner of a comic book store. If only Sheldon could have expressed, _no admitted_, to Penny that it had nothing to do with Amy and everything to do with _his heart_. But Penny had been flippant and Sheldon had been obtuse and they both had played it off as a joke. If only.

The door had been opened, just a crack, and then slammed shut…seemingly remaining closed forever. Tribeca knew it was time to bid them farewell and so she set about creating their goodbye scene in her heart as a way of bringing closure to an unfulfilled love.

**~73~**

"This is it," Penny said, brushing her hands together after dropping the last remaining box next to the door and then turning to survey her empty apartment.

"I suppose," he said, fighting back tears and praying to his Mother's God that Penny wouldn't notice.

She had already noticed the tears when he had helped her empty out the plates and dishes from her now bare cupboards. But she'd been fighting back her own tears and had chosen not to comment on his.

"I'm gonna miss you," she whispered up to him, no longer concerned with keeping her emotions in check.

"And I you," he said, unable to keep the solitary tear from escaping past his brimming eyes.

"Why are you crying Sweetie?" she asked as her own tears now slid freely down her face.

He sniffed and shoved his hands deep into his pockets, "I don't know."

"You don't know or you don't want to say?" she challenged him, because really, wasn't that what she'd always done…challenged the boy?

"A bit of both I guess," he said, letting go of his air of superiority and slipping into his southern twang. She always brought that out in him. But then again, she always brought a lot of things out in him. Places no one else would ever be able to reach, parts of him that were reserved for her alone.

"I always thought…" she began and then thought better of it and stopped herself.

"What? You always thought what?" he turned to her while swiping the back of his hand across his wet face, attempting to wipe away the evidence of his feelings.

"Never mind….it's doesn't matter anyway," she sighed and wrapped her arms around her torso in an attempt to comfort herself.

"Yes, I guess if it mattered we would have done something about it long ago."

She shook her head at the sheer honestly of the moment and decided if he could be so bold she could be too. After all, in a few hours she'd be back home in Nebraska and he'd be back in his safe and secure world of science and comic books and…Amy.

"I loved you, you know," she said, her voice breaking against the force of her truth being spoken aloud.

"I do know. And I loved you as well."

"Then why? Why didn't we…?" she had to know before she left California for good.

He scraped his fingers through his short hair and shook his head, "I think we were greater than ourselves…bigger and more powerful than anyone could have handled. We would have outshined them all. Just like the sun, the brightest star in the sky."

She smiled at him, "Oh, the sun is a star?"

He nodded and surprised both of them by reaching for her hand.

"Yes, we would have been like the sun. Too bright and too hot for anyone to tolerate."

She wrapped her arms around his waist, "We would have burned their eyes."

He buried his face in her hair, "There wouldn't be enough sunglasses."

She laughed and said, "That sounds like something I'd say. You've been around me too long."

He pulled her back to meet her eyes with his, "Don't you know Penny? I could never be around you long enough. There isn't enough time allotted for it to be enough for me to be around you. There isn't enough time in the entire universe."

His words caught in his throat and she leaned in and buried her face in his t-shirt.

"We can't burn the world down Sheldon. You have Amy now and I have…Nebraska. I have to go."

He released his hold on her and bent to pick up the last box, "I'll walk you down."

They lingered in the lobby of the apartment far too long, him waiting with her for the car that would deliver her to a world far apart from his. When he held the door to the cab open for her, she gave him one last smile and then sunk into the cool vinyl of the seat. Her fingers lightly traced across her lips, touching the fading moisture from his kiss.

In the cab on the way to the airport Penny pressed her eyes together tightly and tried to remember better days.

**~73~**

The writer, Tribeca, grudgingly and slowly pushed her laptop closed and shrugged her shoulders. She knew there would be no more kisses, at least not shared by the Nebraskan girl and the boy from Texas with the beautiful mind. Sure, there would be more kisses for the boy, but not from the girl he was meant to kiss. The best days were gone, replaced with an empty shell of nothingness.

Every time this writer would peer into the sun without sunglasses, she'd think about what might have been, what could have been, what was squandered by controlling powers.

Maybe someday Tribeca would write about them again but for now, she'd not think about them at all and instead just remember the days that Sheldon and Penny almost burned everyone's eyes out with a light that shone brighter and hotter than any other.

**~73~**

Two or possibly three years later:

Somewhere in Hollywood a brilliant and successful man stared out his window into the parking lot of the studio that had become his home away from home. He scratched his head, turned to study the graphics on his computer screen and sighed.

His bespectacled friend and co-conspirator swallowed hard and nodded.

"Maybe they were right all along," the man said, wringing his hands and looking to his partner who sat on the other side of his desk.

"Who?"

"I don't know, what did they call themselves? The Shennys? The Shennyshippers? Hell, it doesn't matter what they were called. It matters that we made a terrible, horrible mistake."

"I think you may be right."

"Get the blonde on the phone and then tell the tall one to get in here. We've got a rewrite to do."

**~73~**

And somewhere in America, in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, this writer, this Tribeca who had never really given up hope for the blonde girl and the tall physicist, watched the final episode of the series in stunned silence:

_Penny awoke from her dream and pushed up on her elbows to see the time. She knew she'd be late if she didn't get a move on but the bed was warm and the man sleeping next to her was so sexy in the mornings that she found it increasingly difficult to leave his side each day. She leaned in to smooth her lips down his impossibly long neck and stopped to bite gently on his shoulder._

"_Ouch," he mumbled before rolling towards her and blinking his eyes open._

"_Ouch good or ouch bad?" she whispered and he grabbed her and pulled her flush against his body._

"_Ouch good. And who is Leonard? Should I be worried?"_

"_Ewww. Did I say that out loud? I had a dream…well, really a nightmare. You and I weren't together. We lived in some apartment building but you and this gross little whiny guy lived across the hall from me. His name was Leonard and he kept hitting on me. He was trying to keep us apart. He was so mean to you and he was always yelling about stuff and saying you were crazy."_

_Sheldon raised an eyebrow and grinned at her, "And did I punch his lights out?"_

_She giggled, "No, you were too busy trying to escape this girl named Amy. She kept trying to have sex with you."_

_He laughed and pulled Penny closer, "And did you punch her lights out?"_

"_I wanted to, but for some reason I felt sorry for her. And I was trying to be her friend. And there was this sweet Indian guy who couldn't speak, his name was Raj. And a creepy guy named Howard and he was, get this, an astronaut." _

"_God, what did you have for dinner last night that caused such crazy dreams?"_

"_Ug, we had Thai remember? Remind me never to eat anything that spicy past seven o'clock."_

"_Noted," he laughed, pushing himself up and pulling her along with him._

"_The weirdest thing is, I felt so dumb, like I hardly had a brain, like I was nothing. And everybody else was so friendly with each other but I always felt out of sorts as if I was less than the rest of all of you."_

"_I'm sorry Baby. It was just a dream."_

"_I didn't even have a last name for God's sake. How shitty is that?"_

"_Pretty bad. But here on earth, here in the real world, you are and forever will be Penny Wyatt. Or more to the point, Penny Wyatt-Cooper."_

"_That's Oscar Award winning Penny Wyatt-Cooper to you, mister."_

"_Mister? Really Penny?"_

_She smiled and shook her head, "Okay, Doctor Cooper, President Cooper, King of the Earth Cooper. That better?"_

_He laughed, "You forgot Master of the Universe Cooper…that's my favorite."_

"_How about husband? That's my favorite for you."_

_He sighed, "As long as you keep kissing me like this, you may call me whatever you like."_

_She kissed him again and giggled, "How do you feel about Moon Pie?"_

"_What?"_

_She pressed into him and swept her fingers through his hair, "Never mind, it would take forever to explain it to you."_

"_I've got all the time in the universe to spend with you."_

_She laughed, "Make love to me Moon Pie and then I'll tell you everything."_

Fade to black.


End file.
